Fiduciary Duty in the Digital Age: Linking Votes and Rationales Across Investor Types

Description

Institutional investors increasingly shape how companies respond to sustainability, governance, and long-term societal challenges, yet the reasoning behind their stewardship decisions often remains difficult to observe. This project studies a new and largely untapped source of evidence: the written rationales investors provide when explaining how they vote at corporate annual general meetings.

Using large-scale quantitative analysis and AI-based language models, the project links what investors do with how they justify their decisions, opening a new window onto fiduciary responsibility in practice. It asks how different investors understand their duties, which risks and values they emphasize, and whether their public reasoning corresponds to their actual voting behavior. In doing so, the project makes an underexplored dimension of financial governance more observable, comparable, and open to scrutiny. It contributes to current debates on sustainable finance, accountability, and responsible digital transformation by showing how digital traces of investor decision-making can be transformed into evidence for research, oversight, and public debate.